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Holy crap, Marvel has updated their film schedule again with a sequel to Ant-Man titled Ant-Man and The Wasp. This will be the second film with a heroine’s name in the title (Captain Marvel has been rescheduled, more on that in a moment) which is a good thing. This also makes 2017, 18, 19, and 20 all 3 Marvel movie years, which is nuts.

Additionally Marvel announced 3 dates in 2020 in which they plan to release films. No titles or anything yet, but remember we knew the release dates for all of phase three well before we knew what was coming in phase three.

Here’s the entire slate as of this writing (new/updated films in bold):

6 May 2016 — Captain America: Civil War

4 November 2016 — Doctor Strange

5 May 2017 — Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

28 July 2017 — Untitled Spider-Man Movie

3 November 2017 — Thor: Ragnarok

16 February 2018 — Black Panther

4 May 2018 — Avengers: Infinity War – Part I

6 July 2018 — Ant Man and The Wasp

8 March 2019 — Captain Marvel

3 May 2019 — Avengers: Infinity War – Part II

12 July 2019 — Inhumans

1 May 2020 — Untitled Film

10 July 2020 — Untitled Film

6 November 2020 — Untitled Film

That’s a boat load of movies. A couple of thoughts:

Usually February is a time when movies that studios aren’t that confident in come out so pushing Black Panther to a date that early may not be seen as a great move, however February is Black History Month so the move makes complete sense. Marvel has also demonstrated that their movies will make money whenever they are released by releasing them in traditionally off months before, so between those two facts I bet Black Panther will make all the money.

Disney recently ousted notorious skinflint Ike Permutter from having any say over the movie studio, I wonder if this is a direct result of that. Perlmutter is apparently also the reason that there isn’t much in the way of Black Widow merchandise as well, so I bet his departure is also the reason it’s Ant-Man and The Wasp instead of Ant-Man 2.

Marvel has taken some flack about diversity in their films, in 2018 and 2019 there is a black hero and two heroines while 2017 has Thor: Ragnarok being directed by Taika Waititi, a New Zealander comedian of Maori descent. That’s a lot of steps in the right direction and I hope they keep it up.

Inhumans is still there on the far side of this schedule. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is doing Inhumans in a huge way on TV so sometime soon they’re going to have to start tying that show back into the movies in a more meaningful way, right?

It’s an exciting time to be a nerd. This is a lot of movies in a short amount of time. I don’t know when Kevin Feige is going to sleep but at this point if anyone can pull this off it’s him and Marvel Studios.